Pete Cashmore
Pete Cashmore, known as Peter during his original series, was the champion of Series 35. He first appeared on Countdown on 7 April 1997 at the age of 24, beating Alan Cannon 60 – 43 in the 6th heat game of Series 35. He won four more games, including three scores over 60; one of his notable strong points was his ability to do numbers games featuring six small numbers. However, in his next appearance, he went down 46 – 34 to Natascha Kearsey. His 5 wins were enough to see him into the final rounds as #3 seed, where he defeated Stuart Barker 56 – 46 in the quarter-final. Pete took an early lead, but Stuart caught up with CLEMENT and the final numbers game, making the scores dead level going into the conundrum DUBLLZERO. Pete solved it to move on to the semi-final, where he beat Natascha Kearsey in a rematch of their heat game. The players were fairly evenly matched in the seedings. However, Natascha failed to score in any of the last four rounds, thus setting up a grand-final encounter between Pete and Dag Griffiths. The final was a closely-contested affair of a high standard, featuring spots such as KLAXONS, and Griffiths was leading by just 3 points going into the crucial conundrum. GIANTUSDJ was displayed on the conundrum board, and Cashmore's buzzer was the first to light up in just one second. He correctly answered ADJUSTING to become the 35th champion of Countdown. Cashmore returned for Championship of Champions IX, and got off to a shaky start against Paul Peters after he had leadouts ☓ and unbraid ☓ disallowed. However, he unscrambled both the regular conundrum and the sudden death conundrum meaning he won the match 56 – 46. He next beat Harshan Lamabadusuriya in the quarter-final. A double niner (IDOLATERS/STEROIDAL) promised a high-scoring finish for both players, but Cashmore had already won before the conundrum. In the semi-final, he defeated Simon Pryde after the crucial conundrum PANTIMERS went unsolved, taking him into the grand final, which happened to be a third game against Natascha Kearsey. This game was very evenly matched, with the players beating each other in alternating numbers games and finding words of equal length most of the way through. In the end, Cashmore found himself just two points behind going into the crucial conundrum, but this time, neither contestant was able to unravel COMEDYCAR in the time, meaning Kearsey won the championship of champions whilst Cashmore had to settle for runner-up. Cashmore would return to the Countdown studios one more time, in 2004, to record a special episode, facing Dag Griffiths once again in a rematch of their grand-final. This time Griffiths would be victorious, but Cashmore's entertaining antics (and disallowed words, such as blokiest ☓) left an impression on many a Countdown viewer. Although he is a writer, he is not to be confused with the journalist of 13 years his junior who founded the influentual social networking blog Mashable. Category:Contestants Category:Countdown series winners